Having entered into the world of film at the age of 18, filmmaker Katy Fraser made it her mission to become a proficient tech diver and share the natural world with the masses. After moving to Mexico in 2014, she began her cave diving training. By filming in these mysterious cenotes, she hoped to debunk the myth that caving diving is a sport for adrenaline junkies.

“I needed to find a niche to break into the industry. This for me was really a question of looking hard at the cards I had been dealt and what I had to work with,” Katy explains. “I had to come up with a business plan of how I could make this work. I was extremely creative and at this point I had learnt how to edit my own films together but that wasn’t a niche. I wondered how far I could get if I used the money that would have been spent on university fees for diving qualifications. I found that, if you fully immerse yourself in a small community like the diving world turns out you can get a pretty long way. It wasn’t long before I was trading film for courses or for equipment, making friends who would teach me free of charge and travelling from country to country ploughing through diving qualifications.”

As a young child she had been terrified of the ocean but realised that it was fundamentally a fear of the unknown combined with a very creative, overactive imagination. After a mildly traumatic experience in a first attempt to snorkel over Egypt’s Blue Hole with her family, which resulted in her scrambling back onto land in a blind panic, she was gently encouraged to try diving in order to get over her fear by her aunt and uncle, who were avid divers themselves. This consisted of the owner of the dive shop drawing up a contract with saying that if she saw any jellyfish, octopus or sharks, he would give her his dive centre. That first dive was a life changing experience. “Diving removed the unknown for me, it explained the underwater world and instead of being afraid I was fascinated and could suddenly relate to this whole bustling ecosystem that exists beneath the surface,” she says.